We're having problems with Exchange 2010that have introduced themselves in the last few days that are affecting our ability to create distribution groups, create new mailbox databases, new mailbox database copies, and adding journal recipients to mailboxes, the errors always contain "The name reference is invalid. This may be caused by replication latency between Active Directory domain controllers." We operate a multi domain environment, a forest root domain (Domain A), and two child domains, B and C. Exchange is installed in the forest root domain (Domain A). However the main exchange administration and userbase is Domain C. There is no exchange users or admin in Domain B. Running Get-ADServerSettings shows the following DefaultGlobalCatalog - GC in Domain B PreferredDomainControllerForDomain {} DefaultCOnfigurationDomainController - GC in Domain B DefaultPreferredDomainController - {GC in Domain B, DC in Domain C} UserPreferred DC and GC are blank or {} I suspect the cause of most of our problems is that the preferred DC is in Domain B and there is replication delay between these. Is the best way to resolve this to ; a) Remove the reference to the DC in domain B as a default preferred domain controller b) set user preferred domain controllers using Set-ADServerSettings PreferredServer <DC FQDN>. Would this be retained after a restart or is this session specific? Thanks for any advice

Hi, First we need have GC in Domain C. Then you can try to put GC/DC in Domain C to be the prefered domain controller. After that, you can try to restart topology services.Xiu Zhang TechNet Community Support

Sounds like a GC issue to me as well. Are your Domain C servers in AD sites and services set as GC servers?James Chong MCITP | EA | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+ Security+, Project+, ITIL msexchangetips.blogspot.com

Sounds like a GC issue to me as well. Are your Domain C servers in AD sites and services set as GC servers? James Chong MCITP | EA | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+ Security+, Project+, ITIL msexchangetips.blogspot.com I am also working on this issue with orignal poster. Thanks for your responses they seem to confirm what we suspected. We do have a global catalogue in Domain C in the same site. We are not sure why that would not be processing requests from Exchange but we will make the changes as stated and see how that goes.

Hi Jon_R, How is the issue now?Xiu Zhang TechNet Community Support

Hi we are still having the same problem. We have ensured that exchange is now configured to look at static DCs within our child domain. We are still getting the error shown below We thought maybe they show a problem with the arbitration mailbox but we can see these ok when running get-mailbox -arbitration We have run repadmin /syncall on our DCs which has not resolved We have run setup.com /preparead within the forest root as an enterprise admin We are currently liasing with a Microsoft support rep but in the meantime if anyone has any other ideas or suggestions we would be very grateful Thanks

Hi, Firstplease run Dcdiag on exchange server andrun Dcdiag on DC and then post the error information here. Please check event 2080 on Exchange Server and then post the detail information here. Please run "nltest /dsgetsite" and then post the value here. Please run the command below and then post the result here. [PS] C:\Windows\system32> $Forest =[System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory.Forest]::GetCurrentForest() [PS] C:\Windows\system32> $Forest.FindAllGlobalCatalogs() | Select Name,SiteName, Domain, Roles Please try to run get-exchangeserver servername -status |fl to check the value on originating server and the value on currentconfigdomiancontroller. You can post the result here. By the way, have you tried to run setup /preparealldomains? Xiu Zhang TechNet Community Support

Xiu_Zhang Due to the nature of our organisation we cannot post information that specific, apologies. We are currently progressing a support call through Microsoft. I'll post what the resolution was when we have one thanks

Hi Jon_R, Please feel free to update here. Besides, you can check if your configuration DC is correct via the command that I mentioned. The CDC should also be the GC.Xiu Zhang TechNet Community Support

Sorry for the late reply, we have resolved this issue with Microsofts support. Re-installing the EMC and EMS did not fix the issue, we had to go a step further delete the MMC snap in data, specifically C:\Users\xxxxxx\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\MMC\Exchange Management Console C:\Users\xxxxxx\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\MMC\Exchange Queue Viewer Removing these two files allowed them to be recreated when EMC was loaded. Straight away then we were able to re-create groups normally. Appears the MMC must have been retaining an old GC/DC setting or something.